Gore's Law In Action

Readers of my last post, on the subject of Gore's Law, may have been of the mistaken impression that Gore's law only apples to blog comments boxes. Kiwi blogger David Farrar aptly demonstrates that this is not the case, flying into action in the first half of the first sentence of an actual blog post:

Like a medieval religious zealot, Al Gore claims that those who still doubt that global warming is caused by man are the equivalent of those who think the moon landing was faked.

A medieval religious zealot? I was unaware that the moon landing was actually an issue in the Middle Ages. Oh well...

DPF continues:

Scientific debate is in fact the exact opposite of lunatic conspiracy theories.

True enough, but are climate change 'sceptics' really engaged in a scientific debate? Hardly. While there are uncertainties, there is next to no disagreement amongst climatologists about the fact that current climate change is human induced and a real concern. There is no real debate. What we have instead is climate 'sceptics' grasping at any evidence whatsoever that appears to support their theories though while diligently ignoring everything else. And this is something they have in common with conspiracy theorists.

Indeed, DPF himself, while grudgingly acknowledging that there is "fairly wide consensus that greenhouse gas emissions contribute to warming" attempts to counter this concession by emphasising uncertainties using a quote from an article in the Australian. The quote's from an interview with Jennifer Marohasy in which Ms Marohasy claims that new satellite data and recent temperature trends provide us reason to doubt the danger presented by climate change.

Marohasy is not a climatologist, of course, and her employer has a rather comfortable relationship with oil companies, but none of this would matter if her claims were actually right. The trouble is, they're not. She's not credible, her claims are wrong and one has to wonder why, out of all the good information on climate change on the internet, DPF had to choose her as a source. In doing so he certainly did nothing to counter Al Gore's supposition about climate 'sceptics' and conspiracy theorists.

[Update: Edited second to last paragraph for clarity]